Benford's Law Detects Quantum Phase Transitions similarly as Earthquakes

A century ago, it was predicted that the first significant digit appearing in a data would be nonuniformly distributed, with the number one appearing with the highest frequency. This law goes by the name of Benford's law. It holds for data ranging from infectious disease cases to national greenhouse gas emissions. Quantum phase transitions are cooperative phenomena where qualitative changes occur in many-body systems at zero temperature. We show that the century-old Benford's law can detect quantum phase transitions, much like it detects earthquakes. Therefore, being certainly of very different physical origins, seismic activity and quantum cooperative phenomena may be detected by similar methods. The result has immediate implications in precise measurements in experiments in general, and for realizable quantum computers in particular. It shows that estimation of the first significant digit of measured physical observables is enough to detect the presence of quantum phase transitions in macroscopic systems.Comment: v1: 3 pages, 2 figures; v2: 6 (+epsilon) epl pages, 5 figures, significant additions, previous results unchange

Fundamental strings and NS5-branes from unstable D-branes in supergravity

By using the non-supersymmetric $p$-brane solutions delocalized in arbitrary number of transverse directions in type II supergravities, we show how they can be regarded as interpolating solutions between unstable D$p$-branes (a non-BPS D-brane or a pair of coincident D-brane-antiD-brane) and fundamental strings and also between unstable D$p$-branes and NS5-branes. We also show that some of these solutions can be regarded as interpolating solutions between NS5/$\bar{\rm NS}$5 and D$p$-branes (for $p \leq 5$). This gives a closed string description of the tachyon condensation and lends support to the conjecture that the open string theory on unstable D-branes at the tachyonic vacuum has soliton solutions describing not only the lower dimensional BPS D-branes, but also the fundamental strings as well as the NS5-branes.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, one statement corrected and one reference added, v3: more details of the solution used is given, version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Open/Closed Duality, Unstable D-Branes, and Coarse-Grained Closed Strings

At the final stage of unstable D-brane decay in the effective field theory approach, all energy and momentum of the initial state are taken up by two types of fluids, known as string fluid and tachyon matter. In this note, we compare motion of this fluid system to that of macroscopic collection of stretched closed strings and find a precise match at classical level. The string fluid reflects low frequency undulation of the stretched strings while the tachyon matter encodes the average effect of high frequency oscillations turned on those strings. In particular, the combined fluid system has been known to have a reduced speed of light, depending on the composition, and we show that this property is exactly reproduced in classical motion on the closed string side. Finally we illustrate how the tachyon matter may be viewed as an effective degrees of freedom carrying high frequency energy-momentum of Nambu-Goto strings by coarse-graining the dynamics of the latter.Comment: LaTeX, 29 pages, 4 figure file

Ultrasonic Blind Stick for Completely Blind People to Avoid any Kind of Obstacles

The ability to live without being controlled by any action, judgment and any outside factors including any opinions and regulations is defined by the term Independent. But in reality physical movement for travelling or simply walking through a crowded street pose great challenge for a visually impaired person. Also they must learn every detail about the home environment such as placement of tables; chairs etc. to prevent injury. Because of this disability they have to sacrifice their independence in daily living by depending on the sighted people in every busy place like bus, footpaths, railway stations etc. This paper aims to design an artificial navigating system with adjustable sensitivity with the help of ultrasonic proximity sensor to assist these blind persons to walk fearlessly and independently in both indoor and outdoor environment. This system can detect any type of upcoming obstacles and potholes using the reflection properties of ultrasound. Attachment of the system to different body areas makes its utilization more versatile and reliable

D-Brane Dynamics in Dp-Brane Background

By using Dirac-Born-Infeld action we study the real time dynamics of D-branes in the vicinity of a stack of Dp-branes where the role of the tachyon of the open string models is played by the radial mode on the D-branes. We examine the behaviour of the tachyon potential and study the hamiltonian formulation and classical solutions of such systems. We also study the homogeneous solutions of the classical equations of motion in these cases.Comment: 14 pages, minor modifications, to appear in Phys. Lett.

Stretching the Horizon of a Higher Dimensional Small Black Hole

There is a general scaling argument that shows that the entropy of a small black hole, representing a half-BPS excitation of an elementary heterotic string in any dimension, agrees with the statistical entropy up to an overall numerical factor. We propose that for suitable choice of field variables the near horizon geometry of the black hole in D space-time dimensions takes the form of AdS_2\times S^{D-2} and demonstrate how this ansatz can be used to calculate the numerical factor in the expression for the black hole entropy if we know the higher derivative corrections to the action. We illustrate this by computing the entropy of these black holes in a theory where we modify the supergravity action by adding the Gauss-Bonnet term. The black hole entropy computed this way is finite and has the right dependence on the charges in accordance with the general scaling argument, but the overall numerical factor does not agree with that computed from the statistical entropy except for D=4 and D=5. This is not surprising in view of the fact that we do not use a fully supersymmetric action in our analysis; however this analysis demonstrates that higher derivative corrections are capable of stretching the horizon of a small black hole in arbitrary dimensions.Comment: LaTeX file, 26 pages; v2: a simple expression for entropy is given and references adde